Smitty — Life Begins at Forty

A Sunday strip page featuring Smitty, an office boy character who anchored one of the era's most widely syndicated comics. The four-panel sequence shows Mr. Pinch offering Christmas wishes and Smitty responding with ambitious plans to search for a girl and bring her home. The strip exemplifies the visual conventions of newspaper comics: bordered panels, speech balloons, and a recurring cast in domestic and workplace settings. Smitty appeared daily and Sunday across hundreds of newspapers, establishing the format and character types that shaped early comic book storytelling. The strip's humor relied on situation comedy and character interaction—the foundation of narrative comics that would dominate the medium for decades.